Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Xhea closed her eyes, remembering that night. She hadn’t slept, cringing at every sound that might be a girl’s scream or cry, no matter how distant. She had paced these floorboards until the downstairs neighbor pounded on his ceiling for her to stop, and then she’d just sat, hour after hour in the darkness, arms wrapped around her knees as she waited for dawn. Waited for Lane to come home.

  But only the sun returned.

  “The next day I searched,” Xhea said. “Up and down streets and alleys, in the market, the skyscrapers, asking anyone and everyone I could find. No one had seen her.

  “The day after that was the collapse.”

  Then, what was one more lost girl, one more child who might be dead, in the midst of so much chaos? Xhea was not the only one with hair and skin caked white with dust to cling to passersby and beg for word of a lost loved one.

  “Was she in the collapse?” Shai asked.

  Xhea smiled, a thin and bleak expression. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Sometimes I used to hope that she was, just because it would mean that she hadn’t abandoned me.

  “I stayed for weeks anyway, sleeping here and combing the rubble in daylight. The ground used to shake and shudder—you could feel it, as if the bones of the world were moving beneath your feet. The other survivors left quickly, heading closer to the core, but I just couldn’t.” It had been too hard to care, scratching each day through the rubble until her hands bled and her muscles shook with exhaustion. Let the ground take her, if it would; she had no way to stop it anyway.

  “I was the last one to leave.”

  Xhea turned to look at the mound of the quilt in the far corner, a dark shape that she could almost imagine was a girl lying curled for warmth. How old would Abelane be now—nineteen? Twenty? Yet she still saw a child. She didn’t know how to imagine Lane as anything else.

  “I kept looking for a long time,” Xhea murmured, her eyes not leaving the quilt. “Watching the areas of the Lower City where we used to shop or steal, checking our hideaways. I never found anything. No one remembered seeing her after the collapse, or in the days just before.”

  Sometimes you have to leave someone behind, Xhea thought. Sometimes you’re the one that gets left.

  With Lane gone, so too was the life Xhea had known. Their friends and acquaintances were scattered across the Lower City, and those few that Xhea knew how to find spoke to her less and less without Lane’s comforting presence between them. Already word of Xhea’s strange talent had spread, and with it came fear—that same fear she’d seen born in Lane’s eyes years before. Even those who still offered food or a moment of companionship turned distant when Xhea asked for a place to spend the night.

  She’d done the rest of the work for them: walking away when they tried to speak to her, bowing her head as they passed as if she didn’t recognize their faces, didn’t hear them speak her name. Abandoning them before they too could leave her in slow ones and twos.

  Sometimes she wondered what might have happened if someone had taken her in. She wouldn’t have gone to Orren, desperate when winter’s chill set in—yet maybe she wouldn’t have ventured into the tunnels, either, and found she was untouched by the pain that all others felt beneath the ground. She remembered finding the tunnels: a whole world for her to explore and claim as her own; and if some nights she’d felt the press of earth above her head and remembered its terrible power, such thoughts only made her cautious, ensuring the respect that dark places deserved.

  “I’m sorry,” Shai said. “It doesn’t change anything, but . . . I am sorry.”

  “I don’t need your pity, Shai.”

  Shai just shook her head. “Why did you bring me here?”

  Xhea wanted to protest that she hadn’t brought Shai anywhere—that she hadn’t even meant to come here herself. Yet she couldn’t speak the lie; and she knew it to be such, even when voiced only in the depths of her mind.

  “Because they can’t take this from me,” she said at last. “Your Tower. The City. Whoever’s after us. They can’t take it from me, because I lost it a long time ago.”

  She laughed, then—a choked and sputtering sound, but a laugh nonetheless, for she heard her own words and scorned herself for her blatant self-pity. Was glad, again, that the darkness hid her face, for she could feel the sudden flush burning to the tips of her ears.

  “Oh, listen to me.” She laughed again, for it was suddenly a choice of that or crying.

  “Xhea,” Shai said, and in that moment her voice was that of a patient older sister. “You’re tired.”

  “When am I not?”

  “When you’re asleep.”

  Xhea sighed, a long exhalation that seemed to take with it the edge of her mirth and the bruise-like ache of disturbed hurts. There was no use protesting that she could not sleep now, not here, with memories and her words and the smell of dust heavy all around them—she could, and would. She slid down the wall to the ground, curling on a patch of floor made almost clean by her obsessive sweeping. After a long moment, she reached out and dragged the stinking quilt over her legs and shifted so that it dulled the press of her hip against the floor. Reluctance and weariness spoke in every movement.

  “I’ll be here,” Shai said. Words so similar to ones Lane had uttered night after night, more comforting than any lullaby. In that moment Xhea wanted nothing more than to have again the strong tether that had joined Shai to her, and the security of knowing that there was nowhere she could go that the ghost could not follow.

  Instead, Shai whispered, “Trust me.” As if her words were tether enough.

  And they were.

  Shai woke her a few hours later, calling her name.

  Xhea struggled to open her eyes; her eyelashes were gummed to her cheeks. “Am I doing it again?” she asked, words slurred. Her magic felt quiet—but she had no way of knowing what it did while she slept.

  “Xhea,” Shai said again, and her voice was strange. Distant. Xhea rubbed her eyes and saw the ghost’s lit figure by the window, looking out. Her long, pale hair shone in the darkness. “You need to see this.”

  The window was the only part of the apartment Xhea hadn’t cleaned, and she squinted as she approached the grimy panes, trying to see what had caught the ghost’s eye. Though no one lived in this area anymore for fear of further collapses along the length of the Red Line subway, only a fool would assume that none ventured near. For a deserted building to suddenly have clean windows would draw attention—and the last thing she needed, Xhea thought irritably as she pushed tangled hair from her eyes, was more attention.

  Outside, the full moon cast the ruined landscape in light bright enough to read by, while faint stars gleamed along the horizon. Above, Towerlight flickered and shifted like something alive, and though the intricacies of those shifting veils of power were lessened by distance, their colors lost to her vision, for a moment she could but stare.

  “There,” Shai said, her voice low. “Do you see?”

  Xhea followed the ghost’s cautious gesture, and froze. All but hidden in the shadows of the building across the road stood a figure.

  “How long has she been there?” Xhea whispered. The gender was a guess, but something about the figure’s slight stature and halo of tangled hair said “female.” Still and unmoving, the stranger might have been a statue; Xhea wondered how long it would have taken to spot her if not for Shai.

  “Since I looked out a few minutes ago. You were hard to wake.”

  “Gods, what’s she doing out there?” Memory of her long night outside rose unbidden. Never again would she have anything less than four strong walls between her and the things that walked the night. Then again, if the woman was a hunter on their trail, four strong walls might not be enough. “I’m going to back away from the window. Tell me if she reacts.”

  “Xhea.” Shai put out a hand to stop her. “She’s already looking at us. When I called you, she was staring right at me.”

  Xhea went cold, a shiver running through her that ha
d little to do with the spring chill. The figure was indeed staring upward: when she looked, Xhea could just see the glint of Towerlight in her eyes.

  “She hasn’t moved?”

  “Not yet.” Shai turned to her. “How does she know I’m here? Am I glowing brightly enough for anyone to see?”

  “I don’t know,” Xhea said, soft as breath, as prayer.

  Though Shai seemed bright to her, there was not so much magic in the ghost as to make Xhea wish to turn away. Magic, raw or spelled, was generally only visible to more powerful magic users; yet the most powerful magics were naturally in the visible spectrum—Towerlight most notably. She didn’t think Shai was shining bright enough to be seen by the untrained eye—not yet, anyway.

  Movement outside drew her attention. “Shai,” she said, reaching for the ghost’s hand. “There’s another one.”

  She pointed. There was no use trying to hide the gesture, for the man’s face was already lifted, staring at them as if he could see nothing else. As she watched, Xhea realized that he couldn’t see anything else. His eyes were almost pure white.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  Xhea forced her reply past lips gone dry. “The walker we saw yesterday? Yes, I think so.”

  She knew that build, all wiry muscle and too-loose skin; recognized the strange questing movements of his head. Doubted, too, that there were many other naked blind men roaming the streets of the Lower City.

  Shai gasped. “Xhea—”

  “I know, I see him.”

  For coming from the opposite direction was another man, far older. He was clothed, but poorly: an oversized sweatshirt hung from his bent frame, its tattered edges reaching midway down his bare thighs, trailing threads. His hair was white in the moonlight, an electric shock of wiry strands that stood out from a balding pate and protruded in uncut tufts from his lip and chin. He, too, stared at them.

  Xhea met his eyes, and it took all her strength and the paralysis borne of fear to keep from flinching. In his blank eyes she felt a danger as real and immediate as a drawn knife; as if he threatened her with a simple look, this distant figure, this bent ruin of a man, and her cringe was instinctive.

  She was suddenly aware of the key’s familiar presence at the base of her neck, hanging once more from its cord, and realized that she had not locked the door to the building. Locks won’t hold them back anyway, Xhea thought. The was door all but rotted off its hinges. If they want to get in, they can. They will.

  Still, she leapt from her place at the window, not caring as she scattered a pile of dust in her scramble to reach the apartment door and throw its bolt. Once across the room, she grabbed the broken hammer from the floor. The cool weight of the metal head was a comfort, even if it wobbled alarmingly on its handle.

  Back at the window, she stilled, listening for any noise in the building, creaks or groans of an opening door, a foot moving across the floorboards, the smash of a breaking window. Outside, there had been no reaction to her movement. But they saw three walkers; who was to say that there weren’t really four of them, or five? Crazy thoughts, Xhea knew; yet nothing about the three outside spoke of sanity.

  “What do they want?” Shai’s voice quivered.

  Xhea didn’t know, couldn’t imagine. The night before, the wild, blind man had somehow seen Shai; and, if Shai was correct, the woman outside had seen the ghost at the window while Xhea still slept. There was no pretending that they were simply Lower City dwellers fallen on hard times; she knew what they were, even if she’d never had faces to put to the terrible sounds she’d heard at night or the metronome footsteps that circled in the dark.

  In the end, silence was her only answer, and the only one Shai expected.

  Time passed, stretching like a worn elastic band. After an hour or more of watching, Xhea’s eyelids felt swollen and heavy. She sagged against the window ledge, wishing she could rest her aching knees without breaking her vigilance. And still the figures did not move or acknowledge each other, only stared upward, as unmoving as living creatures could be. It almost felt as if the walkers had become part of the landscape: a shadow cast by a fallen wall, a pillar in the road, a broken lamp-post anthropomorphized by distance and strange light. Then one would move or blink, the blind man’s head turning as if he needed to catch their scents on a shifting wind, and a sudden surge of adrenaline would jolt her back to wakefulness, heartbeat thudding in her ears.

  “Maybe,” Xhea whispered, “we could throw something. Spur them into doing something.”

  “Do we really want them doing something?” Shai asked.

  “No. I suppose not.”

  It was only as the far horizon lightened almost imperceptibly, black shading to a gray so deep that Xhea could barely discern the difference, that the three moved. As if this hint of dawn was a signal, as one they seemed to shake themselves; muscles held immobile for countless hours suddenly shrugged, twitched, and rolled about as if in slow-motion seizures. They did not look at each other, only turned to leave: the old man shambled the way he had come, hunched and shuffling, while the blind man stumbled around the corner of the building.

  The woman moved last, and she alone had a gait that might blend into a crowd; yet still she moved cautiously, in a way that made Xhea think of someone picking their way over glass. She eased from the deep shadow that had veiled her, and the last of the Towerlight fell on her face. She was young and malnourished, her cheekbones and the tendons in her neck knife-sharp beneath her skin.

  Yet she was as much a stranger as the two men. Nothing in her narrow, hawk-like features seemed familiar, and Xhea realized that some part of her had wondered if she hadn’t found Abelane at last. It had been a child’s dream, finding Lane—one she’d held close and secret through the passing years—and as the dawning light cast shadows across the strange woman’s face, Xhea felt that dream break, crumble, and fade at last to nothing.

  She watched long after the woman had made her way into the ruins. Even when she released the window ledge and slid down the wall to the floor, her leg muscles cramped and quivering—even when she let out her held breath and allowed her head to sag—Xhea thought, I’ll never sleep now. Not after this.

  But she could and, as the sun at last broke the far horizon, did.

  Come true morning, Xhea could barely turn her neck, and she had to hit her legs with her fists to release their cramps. Take it slow, she told herself; yet the sun was in her eyes, and she wanted nothing more than to be gone from this place and its hauntings of flesh and memory.

  She could not forget this small apartment, its crumbling walls and the remains of a life she no longer lived; nor would she be able to blot this night from her mind, or anything it might portend. But she would try. Broken as it was, she missed her life in the Lower City, the familiarity of her routine, and the comfort of her tunnels.

  Besides, she thought, trying to hide her grimace as forced herself to stand, she was out of food. Again.

  Xhea limped to the door. “Time to go.”

  Shai slipped past her into the hall like a breath of chilled air. One hand on the doorframe, Xhea spared a last glance at the room that had been her home for more than three years. She knew that in her absence, the dust would again settle, coating the floors and counters, her mug and the quilt, with its fuzzy layer of gray. The grime would build on the windows until little more than the glow of sunlight passed through; or the panes would crack or break, damaged by a bird, a shift in the structure, a thrown stone.

  When she left the first time, she hadn’t been able to speak at all, fear and grief stealing her voice and leaving only the taste of tears. Now she spoke a final whispered word softened by something that felt almost like forgiveness.

  “Goodbye.”

  She closed the door behind her, and left it as she should have six years before.

  Unlocked.

  “And another thing,” said the old woman’s ghost. “Those rags on his feet. Those are not socks. It has been years since they resembled socks.” H
er white bun had loosened and now flopped about her head with every emphatic gesture.

  The old man seated on a nearby crate threw his hands in the air and rolled his eyes dramatically. “Here we go. I can already see it coming.”

  “Your socks,” Xhea said. “Your wife feels that they are . . . past their prime.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet she does.”

  “You think I like having to look at his toes poking through those things? Let me tell you, that’s the worst thing about being dead—never listens when I tell him to get his feet off the coffee table or put on a perfectly good pair of slippers. You tell him to go down to Erikson’s shop and get some of those hand-knit socks. Now that’s quality.”

  Xhea turned to the husband, and he waved a dismissive hand. “If she’s talking about the socks from Erikson’s, I don’t want to hear it. Damn itchy things—lumpy too. You ever have to wear lumpy socks, girl? They bunch up in your shoes something fierce, they do, and you limp around like you’re walking on stones. Erikson socks. I’ll be dead first.”

  The woman’s ghost snorted. “He will if he spends another winter in those shreds he calls socks. Cheap old man.”

  Xhea cheerfully conveyed this message, snort and all. Before he could reply, a small chime sounded from the old man’s watch to announce the end of the hour for which he’d paid.

  “Well,” he said and blinked, then pushed back his shoulders as if trying to settle himself in his body, in this place; again seeing only Xhea and not the specter of his wife that he knew was so near, and untouchable. “Well. I suppose that anything else will have to wait until another time.” Xhea had never tried to cut them off, and yet the old man kept the appointments to the hour they had agreed upon, not a second more.

  At the sound, his wife had stilled. Slowly, she unbound the last of her bun, letting snow-white hair tumble down her back before coiling it again and securing it at the base of her neck with a worn hair stick. Always the same gestures, easy motions that reflected habit rather than thought. Her voice was low and her eyes never left her husband’s face as she said, “Tell him that I love him. Tell him that I’ll wait for him, however long he has.”